The Holdovers

The Architecture of Melancholy

In an era where cinema often feels chemically scrubbed of imperfection—where digital color grading renders every frame hyper-real and sterile—Alexander Payne’s *The Holdovers* arrives not just as a film set in 1970, but as a hallucination that it was *made* in 1970. From the opening vintage MPAA card to the hiss of the mono sound mix, Payne has constructed a time machine. Yet, this aesthetic commitment is no mere parlor trick or exercise in nostalgia; it is the essential texture of the story itself. The film’s grain and desaturated palette mirror the emotional grit of its three central castaways, trapped in a New England boarding school while the rest of the world moves on to festivities they cannot touch.

Payne, reuniting with Paul Giamatti nearly two decades after *Sideways*, understands that winter is not just a season, but a psychological state. The cinematography by Eigil Bryld captures the bone-deep chill of a Massachusetts December, where the snow isn't a magical blanket, but a suffocating layer of insulation that keeps the characters trapped inside their own heads.



At the center of this frozen world is Paul Hunham (Giamatti), a classics professor whose very existence is a fortress of solitude built from ancient texts and pipe smoke. Giamatti does not play Hunham as a simple curmudgeon; he plays him as a man whose intellect is a weaponized defense mechanism. His lazy eye and offensive body odor are physical manifestations of a soul that has decided to be repulsive before it can be rejected. He is a man "held over" not just for the holidays, but from a different time, clinging to the rigidity of Rome because the chaos of 1970—and his own failures—is too terrifying to face.

Opposite him is Angus Tully (a revelatory Dominic Sessa), the student left behind. Sessa brings a feral, wounded energy to the screen that defies the typical "troubled teen" trope. He is intelligent enough to dismantle Hunham’s defenses but too young to understand the older man's despair. Their dynamic avoids the saccharine pitfalls of the inspirational teacher genre. There is no standing on desks here; there is only the slow, painful negotiation of a truce between two people who realize they are equally lonely.



However, the film’s emotional gravity comes from Mary Lamb, played with shattering restraint by Da'Vine Joy Randolph. As the head cook grieving a son lost to the Vietnam War, she provides the silence that fills the empty halls of Barton Academy. While Hunham and Tully bicker over antiquity, Mary’s grief is immediate and suffocatingly modern. Payne uses her presence to puncture the bubble of the prep school; her son died in a war the rich boys at Barton will likely never see. The scene in the kitchen, where a simple Christmas song cracks her composure, is a masterclass in acting—a reminder that grief is not a process to be completed, but a ghost that sits at the table with you.



Ultimately, *The Holdovers* is a film about the fragile, temporary families we form when our biological ones fail us. It suggests that empathy is found not in grand gestures, but in the sharing of a contraband bottle of whiskey or a quiet drive through a snowy landscape. The narrative does not promise that these characters will be "fixed" by their time together. The snow will melt, the semester will restart, and they will return to their assigned roles. But for two hours, Payne allows us to sit in the quiet, analog warmth of their shared brokenness, proving that sometimes, simply enduring the winter together is triumph enough.